All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland

Abstract

Reviewed by: All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland William D. Jones All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849. By Jeff Strickland. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 276. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-108-71691-8.) Jeff Strickland has written an excellent account of a little-known slave rebellion that took place in the public workhouse of Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1849. Some twenty enslaved people fought and defeated the guards of the workhouse and engineered the escape of thirty-seven people imprisoned there. The inciting event occurred in the morning, when an enslaved man named Nicholas and some allies defended an unnamed enslaved woman from a slave trader, who had arrived at the workhouse to retrieve her for medical treatment and eventual sale. The jailers and city authorities were slow to respond, providing Nicholas and others with time to organize and arm themselves with tools. Though white militiamen captured most of the escapees within hours of the uprising, and the Charleston Courts of Magistrates and Freeholders tried and executed Nicholas and other accused leaders two days later, the rebellion at the workhouse influenced local politics. Strickland argues that the incident encouraged jail and policing reforms, raised nativist fears, and led enslavers to further question the position of the church in a slave society. He also contends that the city annexed the Charleston Neck because of the rebellion, since the new workhouse in the Neck became the only place [End Page 144] for Charleston enslavers to imprison enslaved people while the old one was under renovation. Strickland weaves together two strands of historical analysis. On the one hand, he contextualizes the 1849 workhouse rebellion, understanding it as a product of the workhouse conditions, urban enslavement, and the revolutionary thought that circulated in the Atlantic world. To understand the rebellion, he contends, the reader must also understand the highly policed nature of urban enslavement and the place of the workhouse in Charleston’s system of racial slavery. Charleston enslavers sent enslaved people to the workhouse to be whipped. Authorities imprisoned fugitive enslaved people there. The work-house was also on the site of the city’s slave market, so slave traders often confined people in it before and after sale. Other elements important to nineteenth-century southern history, including revolutionary rhetoric, slave rebellions, and the domestic slave trade, are likewise important to the story of this uprising. On the other hand, readers must understand who Nicholas was, and Strickland provides the best biography of the rebellion’s leader possible. Born enslaved, Nicholas at a young age fell into the hands of William Kelly, a plasterer, who trained Nicholas in his trade and often hired him out to others. When Nicholas was a young adult in the mid-1840s, Kelly left Charleston for New Orleans and took the people he enslaved to Louisiana with him. There, Kelly allowed Nicholas latitude in his labor arrangements, so much so that when Kelly returned to South Carolina, he left Nicholas behind to continue his lucrative work. After Kelly discovered that Nicholas was withholding the wages he earned in New Orleans, the enslaver transported him back to Charleston against his will. As Kelly tried to sell Nicholas there, the enslaved man resisted a search of his body and assaulted an employee of a slave trader, which landed Nicholas in the workhouse. Strickland’s accessible prose, narrative style, and comprehensive contextualization mix well with his fascinating and enlightening analyses of the workhouse and urban enslavement. All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 will be excellent to teach with. As contemporary public rhetoric emphasizes prison and policing reform, the intertwined histories of the enslavement and the incarceration of Black people that Strickland depicts is as revelatory as it is harrowing. For as much as All for Liberty has to say about the nineteenth-century United States, the story of the 1849 workhouse rebellion may have even more to say about the country today. William D. Jones Rice University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association